Idyllic Bliss Revisited...

Its been years since I visited my native villages...Arakulam in Idukki and Kattanam in Alappuzha. In the ignorance of my childhood days I sometimes abhored the summer holidays that had to be spent there instead of the urban fun and frolic I missed out on in Trivandrum. Looking back I am so glad my parents overruled our initial wild protestations and packed us off when school finished...though...once we got into the pastoral grove....we were so hesitant to come back...today i cant even remember a single vacation spent in trivandrum but every holiday spent in these two little but contradicting paradises on earth still remain so vivid, so fresh in memory...even after the passage of 10-20 years.

Arakulam...yet another village in Central Kerala, abounding with rubber trees, roads that got tarred only in the last decade, surrounded by seven hills like Rome, streams that flow through rubber estates, the Periyar in all its grandeur flowing a stone's throw away and of taking a bath in its freezing cold waters, greenery that would make your heart skip a beat, an unearthly silence broken only by the crickets and the lone owl, the fireflies that dance among the rubber trees in the pitch-black darkness of the night, rain that catches you by surprise...starts with a hissing sound somewhere behind you...and as you belatedly realize wht is abt to befall...the desperate retreat to the house as it teases you in mock pursuit and finally beats down so hard on the earth leaving u drenched...and finally the smell of the earth after a rain! And the people...the rubber tappers, skillfully plying their trade before the world awakens and a second round, to come collecting the milk thats oozed out after their early morning scrape. Then the cliched flashy achayanmar on their jeeps gulping in toddy, fresh off the palm at noon...and imfl, fresh off the bar, by evening...and some of the most beautiful women in the state but then beauty never came with brains in this part of the world, a people who can never get fed up with feasting on chicken, duck, rabbit and pork, of chettathees who compulsarily carry a rosary in their hand...i wonder now why there are so many family quarrels in that part of the world though people pray with such fervor. A visiting friend of my dad summed up Idukki in a sentence..."muttinu muttinu kallu shaappum, muttinu muttinu kurishu pallikalum"!

Kattanam, a hamlet in direct contrast to Arakulam...at sea-level or lesser, abounding with paddy fields stretching miles and miles looking like a green ocean, part of the rice-bowl of Kerala, Kuttanad, a sleepy little village with an unassuming, almost self-effacing race of people...people who are real sons of the soil as they toil at their farms...work hand-in-hand with the laborers they employ...i see my ammachi again...making kanji for the twenty odd farm-hands hired for the harvest season...and its earthy taste when had with the plaavela for a spoon, i remember trying my hand at seperating the grain from the chaff, the cows(and their chanakam in which my mom wud wrap each of my fallen teeth and throw it onto the top of the house for i believe some bird or fairy to come take!), the hens whom we wud displace everyday to see if they had laid eggs, the pond which irrigated the field...near which i wudnt go near coz someone said a python lived there(a mean rumor spread to keep kids away from the water!)...of Sundays, which wuz the big day when everyone decked up in fine clothes for church and the whole village of about 50+ people getting together after church for kochuvarthamanams and visheshams. Kattanam reminded me so much of Pip's village straight out of Great Expectations...and so did many of the people I met there...moreover I wuz born here! The lone similarity between these two places wuz that everyone around wuz related to each other as first, second, third or fourth cousins if not siblings!

Whatever land I would have inherited one day in these two villages have been sold...dont think my parents expected their city-bred kanni-santhanam to write in praise of the simple life in these places...i know for sure...one day i will buy back my lands...if i am lucky maybe even spent a few months at a stretch in these places, become friends once again with the relatives i cared not to know or keep in touch with while growing up. Well so much for nostalgia...here I am...stuck in one of the most crowded cities in the world...without even a generous sprinkling of greenery for miles and miles...unable to rein in my fanciful thoughts...well, this time the grass is literally and definitely more green on the other side...think i will keep revisiting this post often with the Naalikerathinte Naatil song post playing in the background.